Opening Pandora’s Box: Using leaked and hacked data to understand illicit financial flows

Annalise Burkhart will present the Banker’s Box series of datasets, publications from Distributed Denial of Secrets that serve as the backbone of financial investigations around the world. Formed to capture the data leaks released by hackers and whistleblowers, DDoSecrets acts as a beacon of information in the public interest. The transparency collective works alongside reporting partners like the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), and other cross-border investigative networks, to uncover impactful stories. Considering the recent rollback of financial transparency measures in jurisdictions like the EU, archives like these can be a critical resource for journalists, researchers, academics, and anticorruption practitioners to understand the shadow economies underpinning the global financial system. For example, one Cypriot accounting firm managed money for sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich for 20 years, and their leaked records hold insights into the oligarchs’s investments in real estate, UEFA football, and assets like his private jets and yachts.

Moderated by DDoSecrets’s editor Lorax Horne, a panel following Annalise’s talk will include OCCRP’s chief data editor Jan Strozyk to discuss the ethics of publishing leaks, and creative strategies for how hacked and leaked data can support financial crime investigations.